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RSS Wins, Signals Atom's Death Toll? 249

Posted by Hemos from the well-maybe dept.
S. Housley writes " RSS appears to have conquered the last hurdle in becoming the industry syndication standard. Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification. Even Atom's steadfast supporter Google, appears to have seen the light. Google had previously acquired Blogger, a popular blogging tool that uses the Atom specification to syndicate the contents of blogs created on the Blogger platform. In the past Google had strategically steered clear of endorsing the RSS specification hoping that Atom, would take hold. Google's recent new service that allows web surfers to monitor Google News using either RSS or Atom feeds, appears to be an acknowledgment that perhaps in purchasing Blogger, they chose the wrong specification. "
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RSS Wins, Signals Atom's Death Toll? More

RSS Wins, Signals Atom's Death Toll?

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  • Atom's Death Toll (Score:5, Funny)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:40PM (#13373538)
    Wow, how many people did Atom kill? I always liked RSS better anyway. Now that I know not only that RSS isn't a killer, but has also been monitoring Atom's killing, and indeed even signaling its death toll to the authorities, I'm even more in support of it.

    Now if only RSS could sound Atom's death knell...

    (In case the editors have seen fit to correct it, the original title was "Developers: RSS' Win, Signals Atom's Death Toll".)

    • Re:Atom's Death Toll (Score:4, Funny)

      by minus_273 ( 174041 ) <aaaaaNO@SPAMSPAM.yahoo.com> on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:47PM (#13373592) Journal
      are you sure it wasn't a Death Troll?
      "RSS' Win, Signals Atom's Death Toll" could really be an article about Orcs on the rampage after receiving the fiery signal of RSS' victory on the glorious battlefield.

    • Re:Atom's Death Toll (Score:5, Informative)

      by VoidWraith ( 797276 ) <void_wraith&hotmail,com> on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:48PM (#13373600)
      Not only that, but the comma has no place there...
      • Actually there are no less than five comma errors in that one summary. That's quite an accomplishment, but it's extremely painful to read!

        • Re:Atom's Death Toll (Score:4, Funny)

          by tehshen ( 794722 ) <tehshen@gmail.com> on Monday August 22, 2005 @07:01PM (#13375357)
          If you post a grammar rant then you automatically include one mistake (it's like a law, or something).

          "no fewer than"

          • Greenrd's Law (Score:3, Interesting)

            by wiredog ( 43288 )
            From K5 [kuro5hin.org]

            "Evey post disparaging someone else's spelling or grammar, or lauding one's own spelling or grammar, will inevitably contain a spelling or grammatical error."

        • Re:Atom's Death Toll (Score:3, Interesting)

          by wdr1 ( 31310 ) *
          This is an ad, intended to drive site traffic. Not to say Hemos understood it to be as such, but it definitely is. (If you look at the "About us" on the feed page, you'll see that they also own "NotePage", the the site listed as the submitter's homepage.)

          It's not so bad that this story was approved as an ad, but rather it's so poorly written and poorly understood by the author. After announcing support for RSS, MS's Longhorn team bent over backwards [msdn.com] to explain that they were supporting Atom too. The res
    • Would the toning of an RSS reader for the update of the Slashdot feed to include this story count as sounding the death knell?
    • Guess you could say that Atom bombed - which would explain the death toll.

    • Yeah, it should be "Atom's Death Knell".

      It's almost as bad as people finding their "nitch" (AHHH!! It's "niche"!)

  • Article from a biased company (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bigwavejas ( 678602 ) * on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:40PM (#13373540) Journal
    RSS may have won the Atom/RSS battle, but for Feedforall.com to make such matter-of-fact statements such as,

    "Google's recent new service that allows web surfers to monitor Google News using either RSS or Atom feeds, appears to be an acknowledgment that perhaps in purchasing Blogger, they chose the wrong specification."

    ...When they're a company that exclusively promotes the use of RSS, it seems a bit self-righteous; moreover, presumptuous that Google is simply writing off Atom.

    • Re:Article from a biased company (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:04PM (#13373716) Journal
      And didn't Atom recently become an official IETF standard? It seems a lot more of a win than being embedded in beta versions of Vista - it seems unlikely that Vista will ship without support for all three, if it does then that will give Apple something else to crow about since Safari supports RSS, Atom and RSS.
      • You guys sound like Vista is going to ship sometime soon. I wonder if they will make it in 2006? 2007? Or MS fains will have to wait till 2008 to be able to run the newest and coolest windows. With MS-RSS support, of course.
      • "...it seems unlikely that Vista will ship without support for all three, if it does then that will give Apple something else to crow about since Safari supports RSS, Atom and RSS."

        Are you thinking of the same Microsft that I am? Apple has always been ahead of Microsoft. MS doesn't really care. They won't lose customers to Apple over RSS vs. Atom, and users who don't use IE anyways won't care what MS supports.

        It doesn't seem like a big win to me either, but neither does becoming an IETF standard seem lik

      • Re:Article from a biased company (Score:4, Funny)

        by keytoe ( 91531 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @05:39PM (#13374827) Homepage
        it seems unlikely that Vista will ship without support for all three, if it does then that will give Apple something else to crow about since Safari supports RSS, Atom and RSS
        Internet Explorer 7 - Supports six syndication formats: RSS, Atom, Atom, RSS, Atom and RSS. That's twice as many as Safari!
        • The sad part is it is probably correct to repeat RSS multiple times.
          • Yep, it's true since the version numbers were not handled in a sane way at all.

            From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
            • RSS 0.90 was the original Netscape RSS version. This RSS was called RDF [slashdot.org] Site Summary, but was based on an early working draft of the RDF standard, and was not compatible with the final RDF Recommendation.
            • RSS 1.0 and 1.1 are an open format by the "RSS-DEV Working Group", again standing for RDF Site Summary. RSS 1.0 is an RDF format like RSS 0.90, but not fully compatible with it, since 1.0 is based on the final RDF
    • Even better: when they're a company that exclusively promotes the use of RSS and they don't even have a valid RSS feed [feedvalidator.org], it seems like a good reason to laugh at them.

    • Re:Article from a biased company (Score:4, Insightful)

      by His name cannot be s ( 16831 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:26PM (#13373874) Journal
      "When they're a company that exclusively promotes the use of RSS, it seems a bit self-righteous; moreover, presumptuous that Google is simply writing off Atom."

      No kidding, given the rest of the facts:

      Microsoft already stated that they would be using xml namespaces to add to RSS. Which is exactly what Dave Winer who published RSS 2.0 [wikipedia.org] intended. Microsoft actually consulted Dave before getting very far too. Quote: [reallysimp...cation.com] "Anyway, there's a lot more to what they're doing, but I wanted to say in advance that I think what they're doing is cool. "

      Additionally, Microsoft has stated support for Atom as well. [msdn.com]

      Heh.

    • And to top it off, the submitter's name links to NotePage, which operates the FeedForAll site [feedforall.com] as well. And yet, no "conflict of interest" warning from the submitter.
    • What's more interesting is that Atom is more robust and better designed than RSS, but it's being touted as the future of syndication by companies who don't have any significant background or experience in markup (and that includes Microsoft, of course, who still have a lot to learn).

      This shouldn't really be too surprising, however, since Atom came from some one who knows a lot about markup, and RSS came from a group of people who hadn't a clue.

  • MSRSS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Langley ( 1015 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:42PM (#13373554) Homepage
    Wan't Microsoft making noise a little while ago about adding some extensions to RSS. Isn't this the only reason they are including RSS in IE, not because of some heartwarming realization that no company is an island?
    • You can extend RSS, which means you add nodes to the xml document. The regular nodes are still there allowing backwords compatibility with standard RSS readers. RSS has a very limited capabilities, if you want to do things like podcasting where you need include duration, artists etc, you need to add nodes under a new namspace hence there's an Itunes extension [apple.com] to RSS.

  • Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS (Score:5, Informative)

    by team99parody ( 880782 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:43PM (#13373556) Homepage
    I thought Microsoft endorsed their embraced and extended and renamed RSS [pcworld.com]. Seems like it's now not Atom vs RSS, but "Web Feeds" vs RSS.
    • Microsoft taking a perfectly good standard, "extending" it on their own and claiming it theirs ?
      Why, but thats impossible, that has never happened before and could never happen !
    • I thought Microsoft endorsed their embraced and extended and renamed RSS. Seems like it's now not Atom vs RSS, but "Web Feeds" vs RSS.

      Err...

      This just seem to be a rebranding like Firefox and "Live Bookmarks".

      Numerous hints at it in the article too:

      Because of this, its renaming of RSS is not a sign the company is trying to remake the technology for its own purposes but rather a way to make a distinction between RSS and a feature of IE.

      Microsoft is adding RSS functionality to the next version of Windows, Wind

    • Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:37PM (#13373958) Homepage Journal
      Microsoft is not the only one to embrace and extend. Apple seems to have done the same thing with the Podcast file spec (which is RSS based):

      How To Publish a Podcast on the iTunes Music Store [apple.com]

      • It's a bit different there. It is still the identical RSS 2.0 spec. They are just using a namespace to supply information that isn't otherwise available, such as duration, a subtitle and an "explicit" warning, which are handy (but optional) things to have.

        Conventional RSS tags in Podcasts without these namespace tags work fine, just don't give the extra useful information.

        The namespace allows delineation of info voluntarily added for the user's benefit. It hasn't altered the RSS 2.0 spec at all.

  • Does netcraft confirm it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheAvatar666 ( 670893 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:43PM (#13373558)
    We all know for a fact that if Netcraft doesn't confirm it, it is not dead, so let me repeat. Does netcraft confirm it?

  • Which RSS did Microsoft embrace? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hta ( 7593 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:46PM (#13373586) Homepage Journal
    does anyone have real info on which version numbers of RSS (and according to whose spec) works with the Microsoft implementation?

  • FUD, FUD, and more FUD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:47PM (#13373589)

    About the Author: Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com/ [feedforall.com] software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts.

    Wow. It's a marketing plant trumpeting that RSS is now the standard, made by a company that specialises in RSS feeds.

    • So, is anyone from slashdot going to correct this story?

      This was pure spam, published to sway public opinion in the Atom vs RSS debate, and despite the fact that they've been called out in the comments, their plan is going to work unless slashdot removes the story or substantially edits it to point out the fraud. It will appear in countless syndicated news feeds (in RSS or Atom, ha), in blogs referencing the post (by people who didn't read the comments and were therefore fooled). Google searches about At
    • So to sum up:
      A company that specialises in RSS feeds reports that RSS has conquered the last hurdle in becoming the industry syndication standard. The great victory of RSS over Atom consists in RSS being supported by Microsoft (who is also supporting Atom) as well as Google (who is also supporting Atom).
      Way to crush the competition!
    • Did the editors, or anybody posting, even read the article or even look at the web page the article was posted on? There is so much speculation being posted, and it is obvious no one reads the articles around here.

      Wow, slashdot sucks. Good for the PR firm that got this posted - it should improve their site ranking.

  • microsoft is going to support ATOM too (Score:5, Informative)

    by kard ( 670433 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:47PM (#13373594) Homepage
    from:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/ [msdn.com]

    "
    Beta 1 of Windows Vista and IE 7 for XP currently supports the web feed formats RSS .9x, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. As Sean mentioned, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 support will come in a later release.
    "

  • What's with the bias? (Score:5, Funny)

    by MagikSlinger ( 259969 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:48PM (#13373597) Homepage Journal
    That's hands down the most biased "news" posting I've seen on Slashdot... this month.

  • Crack monkey (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LordMyren ( 15499 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:48PM (#13373599) Homepage
    You crack rock smoking monkey, only like .5% of the web denziens actually use some form of syndication. Most people havent the foggiest idea what RSS even is. So, MS puts RSS into IE: suddenly RSS is going to overrun atom? Somehow I think not.

    IMO, atom is a far better protocol. The creators obviously tried to integrate the protocol with existing XML standards, v. RSS which basically gets as far as tag>. Its far more clear about its payload and is way better suited towards XML delivery. But, decide for yourself [tbray.org].

    I see no problem with the current duality. I do wish Atom were available more places, but I can still live with RSS where I need to.

    Myren
    • As you point out, only a tiny percentage of users actually use some form of syndication. Doesn't this really boil down to, "who cares?"
    • I think the point is, the only thing that can beat a good buzz-word is a good buzz-acronym. Yeah, Atom...that sounds pretty cool. But RSS, holy crap, it must stand for something totally complex and awesome and revolutionary.

      RSS. Just say it to yourself over and over again. It rolls off the tongue. Next to a well designed acronym such as that, Atom just seems really simple.
    • The creators obviously tried to integrate the protocol with existing XML standards

      I'd say that's also true with RSS 1.0 with its RDF base.

  • Formats don't die (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:52PM (#13373630)
    Old formats don't die, they just go into maintenance mode.

    Saying one format or another has won is always premature. The only time it's safe to say that a format is dead is when they have to build new equipment to read it because the hardware is missing. And even then you never know.

    This article is obviously biased. It's like when Netscape said "the desktop is dead" when the Java plugin was first released.

  • Is that so? (Score:5, Informative)

    by savala ( 874118 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:52PM (#13373633)
    Strange that...
    Windows Vista will support all common RSS formats, including: RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.3. We will support Atom 1.0 when it's released.
    source: msdn.microsoft.com [microsoft.com]

  • Articles, with extra, commas (Score:5, Funny)

    by blueZ3 ( 744446 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:53PM (#13373643) Homepage
    are, frequently posted, on slashdot. They, often amuse, me.

  • RSS vs. ATOM (Score:4, Interesting)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:54PM (#13373648) Homepage
    I've seen people in both camps, but have yet to see a true pro/con list for each. Anyone care to share?

    I've implemented RSS before, never bothered with ATOM, since RSS seems to be better supported client side.

    What are the advantages/disadvantages of each standard?

    • Re:RSS vs. ATOM (Score:5, Informative)

      by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:02PM (#13373705) Homepage Journal
      RSS has 11 different varieties, 9 if you exclude the two attempts at an "RSS 3". Atom has a single variety.

      RSS 1.0 has a way to include HTML in the feed. RSS 2.0 doesn't. Atom does, and also supports XHTML.

      RSS 1.0 is extensible in a standard way via namespaces. RSS 2.0 is extended via ad-hoc additions. Atom is extensible via namespaces.

      Atom is more complicated than RSS 1.0, which is more complicated than RSS 2.0.
      • Atom has two versions: 0.3 and 1.0 (not counting any intermediate drafts that people may have hacked up support for and then forgotten about).

        People include HTML in RSS 2.0 feeds all the time. Escaped markup may be gross, but people use it.

        Likewise, most RSS 2.0 extensions seem to use namespaces.

      • RSS 1.0 is extensible in a standard way via namespaces. RSS 2.0 is extended via ad-hoc additions. Atom is extensible via namespaces.

        The backbone on RSS1.0 extensibility [resource.org] is namespaces _and_ RDF, in that it can be merged with any other RDF vocabularies.

        RSS2.0 is extensible via namespaces [harvard.edu]. For example, Microsoft's Simple List Extension [microsoft.com] to RSS 2.0.

        Atom is more complicated than RSS 1.0, which is more complicated than RSS 2.0.

        I don't know how you've come to the conclusion that Atom is more complicated

    • It doesn't really matter.

      Really, it doesn't. It's like picking what color wire you want.

      That said: ATOM specifies a bunch of stuff about how to publish entries and stuff.

      It's working it's way through the IETF, if I understand right.

      Basically, serious net work is going into Atom. I strongly suspect I'll be using it in the near future.

      But again, it hardly matters at all. There are tons of tools that accept and publish everything.

  • well... (Score:2, Funny)

    by DarkLox ( 621089 )
    When GoogleOS comes out, and they buy out Microsoft and Atom will live again

  • Who Cares? (Score:5, Informative)

    by WombatControl ( 74685 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:55PM (#13373656)

    To be honest, the RSS vs. Atom thing is a lot like DVD+R and DVD-R - at this point they might as well be interchangeable.

    Just about every feed parser handles both Atom and RSS feeds. Using a tool like Magpie RSS [sourceforge.net] (PHP) or the Universal Feed Parser [feedparser.org] (Python) the format of any given feed is entirely transparent to application developers. RSS 1.0? RSS 2.0? Atom 0.3? It all gets processed by the parser in a nearly identical way.

    Already tools like Movable Type/Typepad [sixapart.com] or WordPress [wordpress.org] generate both RSS and Atom feeds by default. The vast majority of users don't know and don't care which feed format they're reading so long as it works. Both the toolkits and the applications use both formats and there's really little reason why they can't continue to support both.

    There doesn't have to be a single "winner" in the syndication feed wars. Atom and RSS can exist together for some time, and arguing that this is a zero-sum game in which one and only one feed format can exist is ridiculous. As long as the difference is transparent to end users, and relatively transparent to developers, neither format will totally conquer the other.

  • BFD (Score:3, Interesting)

    by scovetta ( 632629 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:57PM (#13373670) Homepage
    Atom is an export format, right? So is rss. They're a little different. So someone at the Googleplex needs to write blog2rss.py and they can get rid of blog2atom.py.

    Or does Atom have something to do with the way the data is stored internally? And I think Google did pretty well with Blogger-- it's like saying, "Google chose wrong when they bought Blogger, because Blogger used a different stylesheet on their home page than Google does."

  • Isn't this cute ... but it's wrong!!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by hritcu ( 871613 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:58PM (#13373671) Homepage
    RSS with its 9 [diveintomark.org]+1 [rss3.org] incompatible versions is hardly a standard for anything. It is a huge pain for a implementer to decide which versions to support. Microsoft decided to support (one version of) RSS for now because it has been around for longer and we know how reticent is Microsoft to everythig new. So, for Microsot, RSS is of course better then nothing.

    However, it is just wrong to say that the format war is over and RSS has won. Atom is a coherent standard now being finished under the umbrella of the IETF [ietf.org], and it is just now just starting to catch. And it will, because many of us have had enough RSS bullshit. We already had a disscussion [slashdot.org] with the guy behind RSS 3.0 which convinced me that with guys like him writing the RSS specs (just for the love of writing), RSS is REALLY DOOMED.

  • Information on the Author/Submitter. (Score:5, Informative)

    by magicchex ( 898936 ) <mdanielewiczNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:03PM (#13373710)
    Taken from the bottom of the article:

    About the Author: Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com/ [feedforall.com] software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for FeedForDev http://www.feedfordev.com/ [feedfordev.com] an RSS component for developers. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net/ [notepage.net] a wireless text messaging software company.

    Needless to say, submitting your own obviously biased, commercially inspired, and untrue article is a tad transparent, but what do I know?
  • in becoming the industry syndication standard. Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification

    Yup, I have nothing more to add besides: smartass.

    Ok, just one more thing: for such smartasses managed MS to be where it is by acting as it acted along the last two decades. Like "ms does it so it is the good thing, everything else sucks". Zealotry school.

  • RSS man (Score:5, Funny)

    by thermostat42 ( 112272 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:08PM (#13373741) Homepage
    RSS man, RSS man,
    RSS man hates Atom man,
    They have a fight, RSS wins.
    RSS man.

  • Captain Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:09PM (#13373747) Journal
    Breaking news, RSS is favored by industry giants! Use RSS, support for Atom is disappearing!

    Oh, and by the way, we happen to produce software to manage your RSS needs!

    "Now that Atom's attempt at replacing RSS has fallen flat, the syndication arena will likely see significant innovation and progress."

    Yes, that's what competition does, it stifles innovation.

    Seriously, though, uniform standards can be great, saving dev time for loads of people and companies.

    But I'd say that, at the very least, this promotional material (that's what it is) is putting the cart before the horse, and is also poorly written. I'd like to read a detailed analysis by an industry expert (not a marketing department), who is qualified to project market share for the standards.

    Also: Google's recent new service that allows web surfers to monitor Google News using either RSS or Atom feeds, appears to be an acknowledgment that perhaps in purchasing Blogger, they chose the wrong specification.

    Actually, this appears to be an acknowledgement that (1) Google would like as many consumers as possible to use Google News and (2) Google is choosing not to use their market share to lock out competitors in related products.

  • Tim Bray: RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 Compared (Score:5, Informative)

    by otisg ( 92803 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:11PM (#13373770) Homepage Journal
    RSS indeed dominates the feed scene, but Atom 1.0 has just been reviewed and approved by the Atompub Working Group [ietf.org] (part of IETF, the same group that standardized HTTP, SMTP, and many other RFCs).

    Thus, I wouldn't be so quick to claim RSS' victory. Tim Bray is a big supporter of Atom, and here is recent report titled RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 Compared [tbray.org]. Over at Simpy [simpy.com] (feel free to use demo/demo [simpy.com] account if you don't have an account yet), I am happily supporting RSS and Atom (as well as RDF).

    I believe Atom also has the "push" component, and not just "pull" that RSS has. That is, I believe Atom spec contains specification of Atom as a way for making requests to web services, while RSS, I think, only lets you publish the data passively, and have clients actively pull it.
    I can't find good references to this now, but maybe somebody else can find them and reply to this thread.

  • Big win for RSS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:13PM (#13373792)
    I know Sun thought that Microsoft's adoption of Java was A Big Win, too.

  • Microsoft view of "innovation"? (Score:3, Informative)

    by cahiha ( 873942 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:26PM (#13373872)
    Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification. [...] Now that Atom's attempt at replacing RSS has fallen flat, the syndication arena will likely see significant innovation and progress.

    I suppose that's the usual Microsoft view, which means that we can only have innovation once Microsoft has moved and picked a standard that's substantially inferior to the state of the art.

    I mean, the differences between RSS and Atom aren't that big (they are both XML), but within those constraints, RSS still manages to get a bunch of things wrong relative to Atom (see here [tbray.org] for a discussion).

  • Here's why RSS won (Score:4, Informative)

    by atomm1024 ( 570507 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:26PM (#13373876)
    When ever there's a technical niche to be filled, then given a set of possible candidates, costing equally as much (resource- and price-wise) to use, and having approximately equal functionality, the first one to become widely used will probably stay widely used, unless a future competitor has very important technical merits that can not be back-ported to the existing system.

    Actually, everything I said there is basically common sense, but said in a particularly fancy way. RSS wins because it was the first to become widely used, and for the huge majority of uses (millions of random users with their feed-readers), switching to Atom would just break compatibility and offer no technical merits. Why is it any wonder that RSS won?

    And by technical merits, I mean those observable to normal users. If J. Random Blogger can't see how switching to Atom makes things better, then why would he do it? Maybe the underlying architecture of Atom is much better. (I don't know; I haven't actually read an explanation of its improvements, aside from being standardized.) But if the RSS feeds of the present work just fine, which they do, then nobody's going to switch. I mean, if the Internet community made their protocol/format choices solely on technical merit, then not only would JSON-RPC [json-rpc.org] have superseded XML-RPC, but I should also think thatwe'd be using a variant of Aaron Swartz's RSS 3.0 [aaronsw.com] instead of the XML-based formats by now. It would save bandwidth, make it easier for humans to read and write feeds, and make it easier to parse and generate. (Yes, to parse it you'll have to write a a few custom regexes or something, but you won't need to include a 3MB XML-parsing library.) And we wouldn't need to worry about internationalisation issues like encoding, because RSS 3.0 feeds are UTF-8 by definition. Unfortunately, this is not about technical merits, just like capitalistic competition is never entirely about offering higher-quality goods or services. It's all about marketing, really -- marketing just enough for your product to get a foothold.

    Google didn't choose the "wrong" specification. They chose a doomed one, maybe, but that doesn't make it bad.

    • Let's assume RSS "won" something. (Which in itself is baloney - Atom is still very much around and well-supported.)

      Which RSS "won"? RSS 2.0? RSS 1.0? RSS 0.91? Any of the 9 different incompatible versions of RSS?

      There's a reason why non-XML formats like JSON-RPC and RSS3.0 never caught on - it's because they're not based on XML. XML, for all its shortcomings, is supported by damn near everything under the sun. You can query it with XPath, transform it back into XHTML with XSTL, slice it, dice it, and tu

      • transform it back into XHTML with XSTL

        Which you usually don't do (unless you're writing a web-based feedreader), but the ability to create both the web page (XHTML) and feed (RSS/Atom) from the XML templating simply by applying a different XSL is, on the other hand, very pleasing.

  • Ask Slashdot: Easy RSS? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kisrael ( 134664 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:28PM (#13373887) Homepage
    I have a homebrew-ed backend weblog, http://kisrael.com/ [kisrael.com]

    I know RSS has forked, and I don't use it much myself but I know others have asked for an RSS feed...is there a simple guide to outputting my content in an RSS kind of way?

    Also, if I wanted to mirror my content on an LJ, would it be easier to automate the LJ postings and get an RSS feed off of that, or vice versa, or are they completely indpendent tasks?

  • Bias (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slapout ( 93640 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:34PM (#13373921)
    RSS will be in Longhorn

    Yeah, because there's absolutely no possibilty that someone will write a program for Longhorn(Vista) that will support Atom.

    Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification

    I guess because Microsoft declares something, that's it. Everyone else should just pack up and go home. (Someone should be sure to tell those Firefox people that Firefox isn't going to be on the Vista install CD!)

    I don't have a dog in this fight, but this story seems to have a bias.
     
    • Yeah, because there's absolutely no possibilty that someone will write a program for Longhorn(Vista) that will support Atom.

      (Picking up where the first set of sarcasm left off...)

      None whatsoever. Not even Microsoft will touch it. Oh, wait! [msdn.com]

      For those who'd rather not read the article, it's from the Longhorn RSS team blog, and it's titled "Longhorn (hearts) Atom, too."
  • This is such a non story. There are so many reasons that MS would want Atom I can't even begin to imagine Atom not taking over the world in the next year:

    http://www.feedblog.org/2005/08/long_live_atom.htm l [feedblog.org]
  • I know there's a lot of contention over RSS version numbers, where they aren't necessarily in order or unique, but an "RSS prime" just seems excessively confusing.

    (Actually, this is clearly the regular possessive of RSS, which is, I suppose, plural)

  • Poor dying Google... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:41PM (#13373993) Homepage Journal
    Google had previously acquired Blogger, a popular blogging tool that uses the Atom specification to syndicate the contents of blogs created on the Blogger platform.

    ...and we all know that Google's poor, beleaguered programmers will be incapable of altering the source of the application they own to transmit two. different. formats! of syndication data. That'd be like expecting them to support multiple locales or offer some kind of an aggregated news service. Why, oh why, must we constantly demand the impossible of our heroes?

    Or they could just let an intern hack something up one weekend. Either way.

  • Atom is more than a feed format (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joeykiller ( 119489 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:45PM (#13374018) Journal
    It's worth noting that Atom is more than RSS is, in that it is also a push/publication format. You can use Atom to post to your blog; you can use it to upload pictures and files, delete postings, etc. It's quite possible that the two formats could continue to co-exists peacefully, merely because they fill different functions.

  • What a troll (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lac ( 135355 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:59PM (#13374099)
    The submitter seems to think that Google bought Blogger because it uses Atom for feeds. Clue: I bet its market share was more of a selling point. Additional clue: adding rss feeds to blogger is probably (a) easy and (b) completely non-controversial to anyone remotely sane.
  • Funny, just last week everyone was going off about how horrible it was that Microsoft was destroying RSS by renaming it as "Web Feeds," but now suddenly RSS has "won."
  • I'm all for ads on Slashdot, but could we keep them in the sub-section known as "Advertisements"?

    Not only is this article factually incorrect, but it smacks of paid placement. If the Slashdot folks didn't get paid for this post, perhaps they should evaluate why they just gave away a bit of their brand value to pump one side of a religious war.
  • in becoming the industry syndication standard. Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification

    Does that mean that the final nail in the coffic of Python is Vista's support for .NET?

  • AtomAPI (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Trejkaz ( 615352 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @06:13PM (#13375059) Homepage
    So... can I post to my weblog using RSS yet? Clearly they must have tackled this problem if they're going up against Atom.

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